How To Change Drive Letter Assignments In Windows XP (Video)

How To Change Drive Letter Assignments In Windows XP

Hi, my name is Philip King, and welcome to this tutorial on how to assign a new drive letter to a drive using Windows XP.

Today I’m going to demonstrate how to change the drive letter on drive F to drive letter Q. This technique can be used on your computer’s hard disks, CD and DVD drives, and other removable media devices.

All 26 letters of the alphabet are available for use, though you should still reserve drive letters A and B for floppy disk drives even if you don’t have any.

A word of warning at this point. Many MS-DOS based and Microsoft Windows based programs refer to specific drive letters for environmental or other variables, in particular Drive C. If you modify Drive C’s drive letter, some programs, including your Windows setup, may not function correctly.

Take my advice, do not change Drive C’s drive letter.

Lets begin.

This video tutorial, How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP,
is also available as a HD PDF file for download. You will need Adobe Acrobat 9 or better to view.

• Click START > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools.
  If you have the "Performance and Maintenance" item click on it and then click on Administrative Tools.
• Click Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management.
  This will display a list of available drives
• Select the drive whose letter you want to reassign and right click to display the menu.
• Select, Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.
• Select the required item and then click the Change button.
• Select the new Drive letter from the dropdown list, and click the OK button.
• Click the YES button to confirm you want to change the drive letter, and then click the YES button to confirm you want to continue.
• Close all the open windows
• We’ll now need to refresh the My Computer window to see the changes so click the Edit Menu tab and click Refresh. And the drive letter has been re-assigned.

The great thing about using this method is that if you remove the drive, a memory stick for example, it will automatically assign the same drive letter to that drive when it is re-connected.

I hope you enjoyed this session. Don’t forget to let me have your thoughts on this video.

See you soon.